Today brings another reminder to have your students bring warm snow clothes, gloves and hats everyday. Also, check the lost and found in the lobby by the gym for lost or misplaced items. We have an exciting week this week! Here's This Week in Switzer:
Literature- We are reading our Narrative Non-fiction books in Literature circles the next two weeks- expect your student to have a reading assignment every night. Please ask them about their books and what they are reading- we were fortunate enough to be able to purchase brand-new books for this unit. Books include Lincoln's Last Days by Bill O'Reilly, The Notorious Benedict Arnold and Bomb: the race to build and steal the world's most powerful weapon by Steve Sheinkin, Anne Frank: A Diary of A Young Girl by Anne Frank, Titanic: Voices of a Disaster by Deborah Hopkinson, and Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortensen. Our ultimate goal is to take the lessons and themes from these novels and apply them to a current situation. We will want to raise awareness and promote action by creating infographics using Canva.com. We will finish novels before the holiday break.
DEAR- Students should continue to read their independent reading books. I am encouraging them to think about their book projects and get something completed soon.
WIN- Mr. Switzer's WIN group is focused on practicing for the Math Bee in March.
Math- This week, Mr. Switzer's math class is participating in the National Hour of Code sponsored by EdWeek and Code.org. Here's a great video talking about why we are participating. We have parent volunteers, UNI Computer Science professors and Student volunteers, and volunteers from Far Reach Incorporated coming in and working with your student to teach them code. Ideally, I'd like every student to create something- a webpage, a javascript code, an iPad app- by the end of the week that they can demonstrate for the class. Students will also be partnered with 4th grade students in Mr. Sprau's class. We'll continue to look at coding throughout the year.
Social Studies- Students will begin a mini-research project over a topic from the Civil War to create a Time Magazine-like article. Ask you student this week about their topic.
Science- Students will have a quiz this week- more information to come.
Writing- We are slowly working towards a completed Narrative using descriptive language, internal monologue, paragraphs, transitional phrases, and narrative elements. This week we'll add a little more to our stories by looking at elaborating our stories through character development and pacing. Look for those stories to develop on our blogs!
The good news- our chromebooks arrived last Friday! What this means is:
-Mrs. Bonwell and myself have a classroom set of 27 chromebooks to share between us.
-Unlike at the high school, students WILL NOT be allowed to take the Chromebooks home
-We WILL BE allowed to learn and create using technology in new and previously incomprehensible ways!
Have a great week!
Matthew Switzer
6th grade teacher
6th grade teacher
